If you search Google for "Age of Ideology" or some variant thereof you will find that the vast majority of results deal with the ideological struggles of the 19th and early 20th centuries. I would argue that with the election of Ronald Reagan this country entered a new Age of Ideology, at least in so far as the Republican Party is concerned. What follows are but two examples of this now 21st century phenomenon.
Each year when Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas gets a new batch of court clerks, he invites them to his home for a showing of the movie The Fountainhead, a film rendition of Ayn Rand's novel of the same title. In the novel, Rand, the founder of Libertarianism, pits the architect Howard Roark against the elected officials, who find the building they commissioned too modern for their traditionalist tastes. The officials eventually succeed in subverting Roark's creation to a more traditional building, which Roark eventually blows up in esthetic revenge. This was Rand's first successful novel and reflected her repeated theme of the creative individual against the collective society. Rand, a native born Russian, had given a 20th century voice to American individualism and it has come home to roost with a vengeance.
Notably, Rand chose an architect as her protagonist. An architect is said to be an artist whose art form is buildings. This being the case, the architect must inevitably use other people's money to create her/his art. The logic of Rand's novel is that society should be put at the disposal of its great creators. (In our money-dominated society the great creators inevitably became the corporate honchos.) Art, it must be observed, is arbitrary at its core. It is the vision of the artist and is not subject to any test other than that its creator imposes. This is one of the reasons that art is a lousy metaphor for societal leadership. It must eventuate in dictatorship if the artist as politician is to realize her/his vision. This is, in effect, what Plato argued for 2,500 years earlier when he proposed that the state be governed by a philosopher king. Will we never learn! The only significant difference is that Rand has the additional problem of what happens when talent and ability arise in more than one person, not to mention hundreds or thousands. Presumably you have the battle of the titans in which the mass of mankind suffer.
I first read The Fountainhead in my 20s and was suitably impressed with Roark's valiant efforts to realize his dream and the dead weight of those representing society who sought to suppress it. I eventually worked out the implied scenario, especially after reading Nietzsche. I find it appalling that a Supreme Court Justice should think that this piece of romanticism has anything to do with governance in one of the world's most powerful countries.
Alan Greenspan, our erstwhile Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, is another Libertarian disciple of Ayn Rand. Reflecting the tutelage of Rand and the economist Milton Friedman, who taught that the market was always self-correcting if left to itself, Greenspan said he was "shocked" by the recession caused by the securitization of fragmented mortgages, which he admitted he did not understand. This is the expression of an ideologue or, as Eric Hoffer said for the Communist mentality, a "true believer." That ideologues can rise to such positions of power and influence in our erstwhile democracy betrays the political naiveté of its populace, especially its inability to deal with incessant propaganda.
One of the most dangerous aspects of an ideology is its resistance to change. The real world is subject to continuous change and in these times of coalescing megatrends demanding concerted action from an extremely fractious global population, the last thing we need is rule by ideologues. This, however, is what we will have if humanity cannot get a grip on itself. Most modern tyrannies have arisen out of social chaos. Our future will be no different unless those concerned with society both for itself, and as a vehicle to enable humanity to deal effectively with its future, become vigorous, numerous and, dare I say it, creative enough to persuade humanity that it is one at root and that its only chance for survival is to respond to our immense challenges not as nations, not as races, not as religions, not as cultures, but as a species.
As I was writing this, President Obama announced his willingness to put Social Security and Medicare on the bargaining table in an effort to get Republican support for raising the U. S. debt ceiling, something the Republicans did seven times During G. W. Bush's administration. That a Democratic president would offer up Social Security and Medicare for any kind of political deal would have been unthinkable before the Democrats began to cave after Reagan's election. What Obama is dealing with, and he surely knows it, is the politics of ideologues. Ideologues who care nothing for human welfare or any other societal requirement except their ideology, which in this case comes down to no government at all unless absolutely necessary. Grover Norquist, the Republican no-tax godfather, is now arguing that any increase in governmental revenue should be regarded as a tax and so is to be avoided. He infamously stated that he wished to see government small enough so he could drown it in a bathtub. When Obama first announced, after his election, that he intended to "reach out" to Republicans, he betrayed a naiveté belying his education, intelligence and political experience or, more likely, his intention to accommodate the wealthy, especially their corporations. These were the people who did not shy from bringing the Federal Government to its knees by denying it all funding, as Newt Gingrich did. These were the Republicans that did not hesitate to lie, big time, to the American people about the non-existent threat that Iraq posed to this country. The magnitude of the lie can be grasped when one recalls that G. W. Bush immediately declared "this is war" in response to the 9-11 Twin Towers attack. It was "war" because these ideologues, as exposed by a plan concocted by Cheney and others in the 1990's, were looking for a pretext to launch the New American Empire.
Obama could have dealt with these ideologues by proposing a Tobin tax on the securities transactions of the very wealthy, which the European Union is now considering and which it projects will raise 200 billion euros annually. This transaction tax is analogous to the sales tax we pay on our purchases, except it is applied to the buying and selling of investment transactions, e.g. the millions of daily currency differential trading transactions. Had this been done and the radical economic unfairness aggressively revealed to the public the Republicans and their constituency of wealth would have been the objects of popular scorn as they were during FDR's New Deal. To appreciate what Obama had to work with consider the People's Budget of the House Progressive Caucasus at http://grijalva.house.gov/uploads/The%20CPC%20FY2012%20Budget.pdf In the end, as events of the Arab Spring again evidence, the only antidote to the arrogance of excessive wealth is popular resistance.
Bob Newhard
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